Giving kids a fighting chance

Organizations serving at-risk kids come and go but few stay the course the way the CW Youth Resource Center, 1510 Cass Street, has since opening in 1978.

Founder-director Carl Washington hosts a Nov. 29 open house at CW from 4 to 8 p.m. to celebrate 35 years of structured youth activities. Alums, supporters and the general public are welcome.

His experience mentoring youth began a decade earlier, when he was like a big brother to his nephew Howard Stevenson. After Stevenson was shot and killed by an Omaha police officer in the wake of a 1968 civil disturbance in North Omaha, Washington was angry. A bully and street fighter at the time, Washington went to the old Swedish Auditorium boxing gym looking to release his rage.

"I went down there and picked on the first guy I thought maybe I should be able to beat up, a chubby kid by the name of Ron Stander."

That's Ron Stander, aka the Bluffs Butcher, who fought heavyweight champion Joe Frazier in a 1972 title bout. But when Washington first laid eyes on him Stander was still a pudgy, no-name amateur.

"Everyone was paying attention to him. My thought was, Knock him off and then you can be the top guy. It didn't work that way."

After weeks pestering coaches to let him spar Stander, the exhibition was set. Washington was so confident he brought an entourage. He knew he'd miscalculated when he landed his best blows and Stander didn't even blink. The first punch Washington absorbed was the hardest he'd even been hit. After a few more punishing shots he feigned injury to end the onslaught.

Washington wanted to quit the sport right then but Stander encouraged him. The two men became friends. While Stander went on to make boxing his career, Washington only fought a year. Well-schooled by the late trainer Leonard "Hawk" Hawkins, Washington saw his true calling not as a fighter but as a coach. He believed boxing could give kids a safe activity in place of running the streets.

He first tried forming the gym in 1971 but it didn't take. Seven years later he gave it another go, this time with help from two mentors. A lifelong inner city resident, Washington daily saw unsupervised kids getting into mischief and brawls, hungry for structure, and he felt he could give them the healthy alternative they needed.

"A group of kids I ran across were fighting and I broke it up and took them downstairs to my basement and started working with them. We took two of them to a boxing show at the National Guard Armory and they both won trophies. We put the trophies up on the mantel and the other kids wanted to win trophies, too. So, it grew from there."

He'd have two dozen youths training in his basement at one time with another similar-sized group out on a long run before they took their turn hitting the bags.

CW took the local amateur boxing scene by storm, winning hundreds of individual and team trophies at smokers and the Midwest Golden Gloves.

"I see a lack of respect for one another from a lot of kids, a lot of people, Respect is not on the table like it used to be. Respect is an art we should be going back to. I think a lot of that is lost. When all those factors are gone that's why there's so much chaos."

He says boxing's a useful tool for instilling values.

"Out of a hundred kids probably one of them might box and go all the way to the Gloves and do all he's supposed to do in boxing. But for the rest of them it might open the door for them to get into wrestling, football, basketball and other sports. We can give them that discipline."

He says that discipline carries over to school, work and family life. The kids he started with are now parents and send their kids to him. Reaching kids takes patience and instinct. "I have a feel for when I meet a kid exactly what the kid really wants – if he wants to box or to get in shape or if he's down here because his mother needs a baby sitter. Sometimes they may have aspirations of becoming a champion."

Terence "Bud" Crawford is a once in a lifetime phenom who came up through the CW ranks and now is on the verge of fighting for the world lightweight title. He remains loyal to the CW, where he still trains under the man who got him started there, Midge Minor, and is managed by another CW alum, Brian McIntyre.

In its early years CW was a predominantly African American gym. Its fighters weren't always well-received.

"We ran into a lot of negativity in the beginning. Some cities we boxed in weren't too friendly. It seemed like the ones closest to Omaha were the unfriendliest," says Washington. He recalls that before a Wahoo, Neb. boxing show his fighters got debris and racial slurs hurled at them. They silenced the crowd with excellence.

"A lot of parents with me wanted us to leave and I said, 'No, we're not going to leave.' We parked the cars going toward the street just in case we had to get out of there in a hurry. I said, 'We're going to go back in there, box, and act like gentlemen and we're not going to respond to the crowd. We had 16 bouts that day and we won all 16."

Boxing hasn't been the only avenue for youth to explore at CW, which moved from his basement to the Fontenelle Park pavilion to south downtown to its current spot in the early 1990s. CW once featured recording studios and a dance floor to feed the rap and breakdance demand. Washington organized talent showcases and concerts highlighting the club's many homegrown performing artists

"We were involved in a little bit of everything. We were doing anything we thought could reach kids."

He says he put on the first gang reconciliation concert back in the mid-1980s when he was doing gang prevention-intervention work before it had a name.

He cobbled together support from grants, donations, fundraisers and raffle sales.

"We had to jump over a lot of hurdles in the beginning. What really built the club was raffle tickets. We were out on the corners and kids sold raffle tickets. I was able to do the (initial) restoration here through the raffle sales."

At the boxing gym's peak, he says, "We were going all over the country with kids in the car to boxing shows and coming back with a lot of trophies." But he feels CW was never fully embraced by its hometown, where fans booed the club's fighters when the national Golden Gloves were fought here. Boxing's also lost kids to martial arts and other activities.

Looking back, he says he's proudest of just "being able to survive," adding, "We've been pretty blessed."

Though CW doesn't have as many competitive boxers as it once did, he's seeing more kids come as a result of Bud Crawford's success. He scaled down the club's entertainment facets after frictions surfaced between performers. He stopped holding concerts after a drive-by shooting outside the club. He recently formed a hoops program as a new outlet .

One thing that hasn't changed, he says, is "I open my doors to everybody and I never charge a membership fee."